THE STORY OF THE PRODIGAL
WIFE
Hosea 1-3
IT has often been remarked that, unlike the first
Doomster of Israel, Israel’s first Evangelist was one of themselves,
a native and citizen, perhaps even a priest, of the land to which he
was sent. This appears even in his treatment of the stage and soil
of his ministry. Contrast him in this respect with Amos.
In the Book of Amos we have few glimpses of the scenery of Israel,
and these always by flashes of the lightnings of judgment: the towns
in drought or earthquake or siege; the vineyards and orchards under
locusts or mildew; Carmel itself desolate, or as a hiding-place from
God’s wrath.
But Hosea’s love steals across his whole land like the dew,
provoking every separate scent and color, till all Galilee lies
before us lustrous and fragrant as nowhere else outside the parables
of Jesus. The Book of Amos, when it would praise God’s works, looks
to the stars. But the poetry of Hosea clings about his native soil
like its trailing vines. If he appeals to the heavens, it is only
that they may speak to the earth, and the earth to the corn and the
wine, and the corn and the wine to Jezreel (Hos 2:23) Even the wild
beasts-and Hosea tells us of their cruelty almost as much as Amos-he
cannot shut out of the hope of his love: "I will make a covenant for
them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and
with the creeping things of the ground." (Hos 2:20) God’s love-gifts
to His people are corn and wool, flax and oil; while spiritual
blessings are figured in the joys of them who sow and reap. With
Hosea we feel all the seasons of the Syrian year: early rain and
latter rain, the first flush of the young corn, the scent of the
vine blossom, the "first ripe fig of the fig-tree in her first
season," the bursting of the lily; the wild vine trailing on the
hedge, the field of tares, the beauty of the full olive in sunshine
and breeze; the mists and heavy dews of a summer morning in Ephraim,
the night winds laden with the air of the mountains, "the scent of
Lebanon." {Hos 6:3-4; Hos 7:8; Hos 9:10; Hos 14:6; Hos 7:7-8} Or it
is the dearer human sights in valley and field: the smoke from the
chimney, the chaff from the threshing-floor, the doves startled to
their towers, the fowler and his net; the breaking up of the fallow
ground, the harrowing of the clods, the reapers, the heifer that
treadeth out the corn; the team of draught oxen surmounting the
steep road, and at the top the kindly driver setting in food to
their jaws. {Hos 7:11-12; Hos 10:11; Hos 11:4 etc.}
Where, I say, do we find anything like this save in the parables of
Jesus? For the love of Hosea was as the love of that greater
Galilean: however high, however lonely it soared, it was yet rooted
in the common life below, and fed with the unfailing grace of a
thousand homely sources.
But just as the Love which first showed itself in the sunny Parables
of Galilee passed onward to Gethsemane and the Cross, so the love of
Hosea, that had wakened with the spring lilies and dewy summer
mornings of the North, had also, ere his youth was spent, to meet
its agony and shame. These came upon the prophet in his home, and in
her in whom so loyal and tender a heart had hoped to find his
chieftest sanctuary next to God. There are, it is true, some of the
ugliest facts of human life about this prophet’s experience; but the
message is one very suited to our own hearts and times. Let us read
this story of the Prodigal Wife as we do that other Galilean tale of
the Prodigal Son. There as well as here are harlots; but here as
well as there is the clear mirror of the Divine Love. For the Bible
never shuns realism when it would expose the exceeding hatefulness
of sin or magnify the power of God’s love to redeem. To an age which
is always treating conjugal infidelity either as a matter of comedy
or as a problem of despair, the tale of Hosea and his wife may still
become what it proved to his own generation, a gospel full of love
and hope.
The story, and how it led Hosea to understand God’s relations to
sinful men, is told in the first three chapters of his book. It
opens with the very startling sentence: "The beginning of the word
of Jehovah to Hosea:-And Jehovah said to Hosea, Go, take thee a wife
of harlotry and children of harlotry: for the Land hath committed
great harlotry in departing from Jehovah."
The command was obeyed. "And he went and took Gomer, daughter of
Diblaim; and she conceived, and bare to him a son. And Jehovah said
unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little and I shall visit,
the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will bring to an
end the kingdom of the house of Israel; and it shall be on that day
that I shall break the bow of Israel in the Vale of Jezreel"-the
classic battlefield of Israel. "And she conceived again, and bare a
daughter; and He said to him, Call her name Unloved," or
"That-never-knew-a-Father’s-Pity; for I will not again have
pity"-such pity as a Father hath-"on the house of Israel, that I
should fully forgive them. And she weaned Unpitied, and conceived,
and bare a son. And He said, Call his name Not-My-People; for ye are
not My people, and I-I am not yours."
It is not surprising that divers interpretations have been put upon
this troubled tale. The words which introduce it are so startling
that very many have held it to be an allegory, or parable, invented
by the prophet to illustrate, by familiar human figures, what was at
that period the still difficult conception of the Love of God for
sinful men. But to this well-intended argument there are insuperable
objections. It implies that Hosea had first awakened to the
relations of Jehovah and Israel-He faithful and full of affection,
she unfaithful and thankless-and that then, in order to illustrate
the relations, he had invented the story. To that we have an
adequate reply. In the first place, though it were possible, it is
extremely improbable, that such a man should have invented such a
tale about his wife, or, if he was unmarried, about himself. But, in
the second place, he says expressly that his domestic experience was
the "beginning of Jehovah’s word to him." That is, he passed through
it first, and only afterwards, with the sympathy and insight thus
acquired, he came to appreciate Jehovah’s relation to Israel.
Finally, the style betrays narrative rather than parable. The simple
facts are told; there is an absence of elaboration; there is no
effort to make every detail symbolic; the names Gomer and Diblaim
are apparently those of real persons; every attempt to attach a
symbolic value to them has failed.
She was, therefore, no dream, this woman, but flesh and blood: the
sorrow, the despair, the sphinx of the prophet’s life; yet a sphinx
who in the end yielded her riddle to love.
Accordingly a large number of other interpreters have taken the
story throughout as the literal account of actual facts. This is the
theory of many of the Latin and Greek Fathers, of many of the
Puritans and of Dr. Pusey-by one of those agreements into which,
from such opposite schools, all these commentators are not
infrequently drawn by their common captivity to the letter of
Scripture. When you ask them, How then do you justify that first
strange word of God to Hosea, {Hos 1:2} if you take it literally and
believe that Hoses was charged to marry a woman of public shame?
They answer either that such an evil may be justified by the bare
word of God, or that it was well worth the end, the salvation of a
lost soul. And indeed this tragedy would be invested with an even
greater pathos if it were true that the human hero had passed
through a self-sacrifice so unusual, had incurred such a shame for
such an end. The interpretation, however, seems forbidden by the
essence of the story. Had not Hosea’s wife been pure when he married
her she could not have served as a type of the Israel whose earliest
relations to Jehovah he describes as innocent. And this is confirmed
by other features of the book: by the high ideal which Hosea has of
marriage, and by that sense of early goodness and early beauty
passing away like morning mist, which is so often and so
pathetically expressed that we cannot but catch in it the echo of
his own experience. As one has said to whom we owe, more than to any
other, the exposition of the gospel in Hosea, "The struggle of
Hosea’s shame and grief when he found his wife unfaithful is
altogether inconceivable unless his first love had been pure and
full of trust in the purity of its object."
How then are we to reconcile with this the statement of that command
to take a wife of the character so frankly described? In this
way-and we owe the interpretation to the same lamented scholar.
When, some years after his marriage, Hosea at last began to be aware
of the character of her whom he had taken to his home, and while he
still brooded upon it, God revealed to him why He who knoweth all
things from the beginning had suffered His servant to marry such a
woman; and Hosea, by a very natural anticipation, in which he is
imitated by other prophets, pushed back his own knowledge of God’s
purpose to the date when that purpose began actually to be
fulfilled, the day of his betrothal. This, though he was all
unconscious of its fatal future, had been to Hosea the beginning of
the word of the Lord. On that uncertain voyage he had sailed with
sealed orders.
Now this is true to nature, and may be matched from our own
experience. "The beginning of God’s word" to any of us-where does it
lie? Does it lie in the first time the meaning of our life became
articulate, and we are able to utter it to others? Ah, no; it always
lies far behind that, in facts and in relationships, of the Divine
meaning of which we are at the time unconscious, though now we know.
How familiar this is in respect to the sorrows and adversities of
life: dumb, deadening things that fall on us at the time with no
more voice than clods falling on coffins of dead men, we have been
able to read them afterwards as the clear call of God to our souls.
But what we thus so readily admit about the sorrows of life may be
equally true of any of those relations which we enter with light and
unawed hearts, conscious only of the novelty and the joy of them. It
is most true of the love which meets a man as it met Hoses in his
opening manhood.
How long Hosea took to discover his shame he indicates by a few
hints which he suffers to break from the delicate reserve of his
story. He calls the first child his own; and the boy’s name, though
ominous of the nation’s fate, has no trace of shame upon it. Hosea’s
Jezreel was as Isaiah’s Shear-Jashub or Maher-shalal-hash-baz. But
Hoses does not claim the second child; and in the name of this
little lass, Lo-Ruhamah, "she-that-never-knew-a-father’s-love,"
orphan not by death but by her mother’s sin, we find proof of the
prophet’s awakening to the tragedy of his home. Nor does he own the
third child, named "Not-my-people," that could also mean
"No-kin-of-mine." The three births must have taken at least six
years; and once at least, but probably oftener, Hosea had forgiven
the woman, and till the sixth year she stayed in his house. Then
either he put her from him or she went her own way. She sold herself
for money and finally drifted, like all of her class, into slavery.
{Hos 3:2}
Such were the facts of Hosea’s grief, and we have now to attempt to
understand how that grief became his gospel. We may regard the
stages of the process as two: first, when he was led to feel that
his sorrow was the sorrow of the whole nation; and, second, when he
comprehended that it was of similar kind to the sorrow of God
Himself.
While Hosea brooded upon his pain one of the first things he would
remember would be the fact, which he so frequently illustrates, that
the case of his home was not singular, but common and characteristic
of his day. Take the evidence of his book, and there must have been
in Israel many such wives as his own. He describes their sin as the
besetting sin of the nation, and the plague of Israel’s life. But to
lose your own sorrow in the vaster sense of national trouble-that is
the first consciousness of a duty and a mission. In the analogous
vice of intemperance among ourselves we have seen the same
experience operate again and again. How many a man has joined the
public warfare against that sin, because he was aroused to its
national consequences by the ruin it had brought to his own house!
And one remembers from recent years a more illustrious instance,
where a domestic grief-it is true of a very different kind-became
not dissimilarly the opening of a great career of service to the
people:-
"I was in Leamington, and Mr. Cobden called on me. I was then in the
depths of grief-I may almost say of despair, for the light and
sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on
earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and a
too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above
us. Mr. Cobden called on me as his friend, and addressed me, as you
may suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he looked up and
said: ‘There are thousands and thousands of homes in England at this
moment where wives and mothers and children are dying of hunger.
Now, when the first paroxysm of your grief is passed, I would advise
you to come with me, and we will never rest until the Corn Laws are
repealed.’" {from a speech by John Bright}
Not dissimilarly was Hosea’s pain overwhelmed by the pain of his
people. He remembered that there were in Israel thousands of homes
like his own. Anguish gave way to sympathy. The mystery became the
stimulus to a mission.
But, again, Hosea traces this sin of his day to the worship of
strange gods. He tells the fathers of Israel, for instance, that
they need not be surprised at the corruption of their wives and
daughters when they themselves bring home from the heathen rites the
infection of light views of love. {Hos 4:13-14} That is to say, the
many sins against human love in Israel, the wrong done to his own
heart in his own home, Hosea connects with the wrong done to the
Love of God by His people’s desertion of Him for foreign and impure
rites. Hosea’s own sorrow thus became a key to the sorrow of God.
Had he loved this woman, cherished and honored her, borne with and
forgiven her, only to find at the last his love spurned and hers
turned to sinful men: so also had the Love of God been treated by
His chosen people, and they had fallen to the loose worship of
idols.
Hosea was the more naturally led to compare his relations to his
wife with Jehovah’s to Israel, by certain religious beliefs current
among the Semitic peoples. It was common to nearly all Semitic
religions to express the ration of a god with his land or with his
people by the figure of marriage. The title which Hosea so often
applies to the heathen deities, Ba’al, meant originally not "lord"
of his worshippers, but "possessor" and endower of his land, its
husband and fertilizer. A fertile land was "a land of Ba’al," or "Be’ulah,"
that is, "possessed" or "blessed by a Ba’al." Under the fertility
was counted not only the increase of field and flock, but the human
increase as well; and thus a nation could speak of themselves as the
children of the Land, their mother, and of her Ba’al, their father.
When Hosea, then, called Jehovah the husband of Israel, it was not
an entirely new symbol which he invented. Up to his time, however,
the marriage of Heaven and Earth, of a god and his people, seems to
have been conceived in a physical form which ever tended to become
more gross; and was expressed, as Hosea points out, by rites of a
sensual and debasing nature, with the most disastrous effects on the
domestic morals of the people. By an inspiration, whose ethical
character is very conspicuous, Hosea breaks the physical connection
altogether. Jehovah’s Bride is not the Land, but the People, and His
marriage with her is conceived wholly as a moral relation. Not that
He has no connection with the physical fruits of the land: corn,
wine, oil, wool, and flax. But these are represented only as the
signs and ornaments of the marriage, love-gifts from the husband to
the wife. {Hos 2:8} The marriage itself is purely moral: "I will
betroth her to Me in righteousness and justice, in leal love and
tender mercies." From her in return are demanded faithfulness and
growing knowledge of her Lord.
It is the re-creation of an Idea. Slain and made carrion by the
heathen religions, the figure is restored to life by Hosea. And this
is a life everlasting. Prophet and apostle, the Israel of Jehovah,
the Church of Christ, have alike found in Hosea’s figure an
unfailing significance and charm. Here we cannot trace the history
of the figure; but at least we ought to emphasize the creative power
which its recovery to life proves to have been inherent in prophecy.
This is one of those triumphs of which the God of Israel said:
"Behold, I make all things new."
Having dug his figure from the mire and set it upon the rock, Hosea
sends it on its way with all boldness. If Jehovah be thus the
husband of Israel, "her first husband, the husband of her youth,"
then all her pursuit of the Ba’alim is unfaithfulness to her
marriage vows. But she is worse than an adulteress; she is a harlot.
She has fallen for gifts. Here the historical facts wonderfully
assisted the prophet’s metaphor. It was a fact that Israel and
Jehovah were first wedded in the wilderness upon conditions, which
by the very circumstances of desert life could have little or no
reference to the fertility of the earth, but were purely personal
and moral. And it was also a fact that Israel’s declension from
Jehovah came after her settlement in Canaan, and was due to her
discovery of other deities, in possession of the soil, and adored by
the natives as the dispensers of its fertility. Israel fell under
these superstitions, and, although she still formally acknowledged
her bond to Jehovah, yet in order to get her fields blessed and her
flocks made fertile, her orchards protected from blight and her
fleeces from scab, she went after the local Ba’alim. {Hos 2:13} With
bitter scorn Hosea points out that there was no true love in this:
it was the mercenariness of a harlot, selling herself for gifts. {Hos
2:5; Hos 2:13} And it had the usual results. The children whom
Israel bore were not her husband’s. {Hos 2:5} The new generation in
Israel grew up in ignorance of Jehovah, with characters and lives
strange to His Spirit. They were Lo-Ruhamah: He could not feel
towards them such pity as a father hath. They were Lo-Ammi: not at
all His people. All was in exact parallel to Hosea’s own experience
with his wife; and only the real pain of that experience could have
made the man brave enough to use it as a figure of his God’s
treatment by Israel.
Following out the human analogy, the next step should have been for
Jehovah to divorce His erring spouse. But Jehovah reveals to the
prophet that this is not His way. For He is "God and not man, the
Holy One in the midst of thee. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?
How shall I surrender thee, O Israel? My heart is turned within Me,
My compassions are kindled together!"
Jehovah will seek, find, and bring back the wanderer. Yet the
process shall not be easy. The gospel which Hosea here preaches is
matched in its great tenderness by its full recognition of the
ethical requirements of the case. Israel may not be restored without
repentance, and cannot repent without disillusion and chastisement.
God will therefore show her that her lovers, the Ba’alim, are unable
to assure to her the gifts for which she followed them. These are
His corn, His wine, His wool, and His flax, and He will take them
away for a time. Nay more, as if mere drought and blight might still
be regarded as some Baal’s work, He who has always manifested
Himself by great historic deeds will do so again. He will remove
herself from the land, and leave it a waste and a desolation. The
whole passage runs as follows, introduced by the initial "Therefore"
of judgment:-
"Therefore, behold, I am going to hedge up her way with thorns, and
build her a wall, so that she find not her paths. And she shall
pursue her paramours and shall not come upon them, seek them and
shall not find them; and she shall say, Let me go and return to my
first husband, for it was better for me then than now. She knew not,
then, that it was I who gave her the corn and the wine and the oil;
yea, silver I heaped upon her and gold-they worked it up for the
Ba’al!" Israel had deserted the religion that was historical and
moral for the religion that was physical. But the historical
religion was the physical one. Jehovah who had brought Israel to the
land was also the God of the Land. He would prove this by taking
away its blessings. "Therefore I will turn and take away My corn in
its time and My wine in its season, and I will withdraw My wool and
My flax that should have covered her nakedness. And now"-the other
initial of judgment-"I will lay bare her shame to the eyes of her
lovers, and no man shall rescue her from My hand. And I will make an
end of all her joyance, her pilgrimages, her New-Moons and her
Sabbaths, with every festival; and I will destroy her vines and her
figs of which she said, ‘They are a gift, mine own, which my lovers
gave me,’ and I will turn them to jungle and the wild beast shall
devour them. So shall I visit upon her the days of the Ba’alim, when
she used to offer incense to them, and decked herself with her rings
and her jewels and went after her paramours, but Me she forgat-‘tis
the oracle of Jehovah." All this implies something more than such
natural disasters as those in which Amos saw the first chastisements
of the Lord. Each of the verses suggests, not only a devastation of
the land by war, but the removal of the people into captivity.
Evidently, therefore, Hosea, writing about 745, had in view a speedy
invasion by Assyria, an invasion which was always followed up by the
exile of the people subdued.
This is next described, with all plainness, under the figure of
Israel’s early wanderings in the wilderness, but is emphasized as
happening only for the end of the people’s penitence and
restoration. The new hope is so melodious that it carries the
language into meter.
"Therefore, lo! I am to woo her, and I will bring her to the
wilderness,
And I will speak home to her heart.
And from there I will give to her her vineyards
And the Valley of Achor for a doorway of hope.
And there she shall answer Me as in the days of her youth,
And as the day when she came up from the land of Misraim."
To us the terms of this passage may seem formal and theological. But
to every Israelite some of these terms must have brought back the
days of his own wooing. "I will speak home to her heart" is a
forcible expression, like the German "an-das Herz" or the sweet
Scottish "it cam’ up roond my heart," and was used in Israel as from
man to woman when he won her. But the other terms have an equal
charm. The prophet, of course, does not mean that Israel shall be
literally taken back to the desert. But he describes her coming
exile under that ancient figure, in order to surround her penitence
with the associations of her innocency and her youth. By the grace
of God, everything shall begin again as at first. The old terms
"wilderness," "the giving of vineyards," "Valley of Achor," are, as
it were, the wedding ring restored.
As a result of all this (whether the words be by Hosea or another),
"It shall be in that day-‘tis Jehovah’s oracle-that thou shalt call
Me,
My husband, And thou shalt not again call Me, My Ba’al:
For I will take away the names of the Ba’alim from her mouth,
And they shall no more be remembered by their names."
There follows a picture of the ideal future, in which-how unlike the
vision that now closes the Book of Amos!-moral and spiritual beauty,
the peace of the land and the redemption of the people, are
wonderfully mingled together, in a style so characteristic of
Hosea’s heart. It is hard to tell where the rhythmical prose passes
into actual meter.
"And I will make for them a covenant in that day with the wild
beasts, and with the birds of the heavens, and with the creeping
things of the ground; and the bow and the sword and battle will I
break from the land, and I will make you to dwell in safety. And I
will betroth thee to Me for ever, and I will betroth thee to Me in
righteousness and in justice, in leal love and in tender mercies;
and I will betroth thee to Me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know
Jehovah."
"And it shall be on that day I will speak-‘tis the oracle of
Jehovah-I will speak to the heavens, and they shall speak to the
earth; the earth shall speak to the corn and the wine and the oil,
and they shall speak to Jezreel," the "scattered like seed across
many lands"; but I will sow him for Myself in the land: and I will
have a father’s pity upon Un-Pitied; and to Not-My-People I will
say, "My people thou art! and he shall say, My God!"
The circle is thus completed on the terms from which we started. The
three names which Hosea gave to the children, evil omens of Israel’s
fate, are reversed, and the people restored to the favor and love of
their God.
We might expect this glory to form the culmination of the prophecy.
What fuller prospect could be imagined than that we see in the close
of the second chapter? With a wonderful grace, however, the prophecy
turns back from this sure vision of the restoration of the people as
a whole, to pick up again the individual from whom it had started,
and whose unclean rag of a life had fluttered out of sight before
the national fortunes sweeping in upon the scene. This was needed to
crown the story-this return to the individual.
"And Jehovah said unto me, Once more go, love a wife that is loved
of a paramour and is an adulteress, as Jehovah loveth the children
of Israel," the "while they are turning to other gods, and love
raisin-cakes"-probably some element in the feasts of the gods of the
land, the givers of the grape. "Then I bought her to me for fifteen
"pieces" of silver and a homer of barley and a lethech of wine. And
I said to her, For many days shalt thou abide for me alone; thou
shalt not play the harlot, thou shalt not be for any husband; and I
for my part also shall be so towards thee. For the days are many
that the children of Israel shall abide without a king and without a
prince, without sacrifice and without maccebah, and without ephod
and teraphim. Afterwards the children of Israel shall turn and seek
Jehovah their God and David their king, and shall be in awe of
Jehovah and towards His goodness in the end of the days."
Do not let us miss the fact that the story of the wife’s restoration
follows that of Israel’s, although the story of the wife’s
unfaithfulness had come before that of Israel’s apostasy. For this
order means that, while the prophet’s private pain preceded his
sympathy with God’s pain, it was not he who set God, but God who set
him, the example of forgiveness. The man learned the God’s sorrow
out of his own sorrow; but conversely he was taught to forgive and
redeem his wife only by seeing God forgive and redeem the people. In
other words, the Divine was suggested by the human pain; yet the
Divine Grace was not started by any previous human grace, but, on
the contrary, was itself the precedent and origin of the latter.
This is in harmony with all Hosea’s teaching. God forgives because
"He is God and not man." (Hos 9:9) Our pain with those we love helps
us to understand God’s pain; but it is not our love that leads us to
believe in His love. On the contrary, all human grace is but the
reflex of the Divine. So St. Paul: "Even as Christ forgave you, so
also do ye." So St. John: "We love Him," and one another, "because
He first loved us."
But this return from the nation to the individual has another
interest. Gomer’s redemption is not the mere formal completion of
the parallel between her and her people. It is, as the story says,
an impulse of the Divine Love, recognized even then in Israel as
seeking the individual. He who followed Hagar into the wilderness,
who met Jacob at Bethel and forgat not the slave Joseph in prison,
remembers also Hosea’s wife. His love is not satisfied with His
Nation-Bride: He remembers this single outcast. It is the Shepherd
leaving the ninety-and-nine in the fold to seek the one lost sheep.
For Hosea himself his home could never be the same as it was at the
first. "And I said to her, For many days shalt thou abide, as far as
I am concerned, alone. Thou shalt not play the harlot. Thou shalt
not be for a husband: and I on my side also shall be so towards
thee." Discipline was needed there; and abroad the nation’s troubles
called the prophet to an anguish and a toil which left no room for
the sweet love or hope of his youth. He steps at once to his hard
warfare for his people; and through the rest of his book we never
again hear him speak of home, or of children, or of wife. So Arthur
passed from Guinevere to his last battle for his land:-
"Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God Forgives: do thou for thine own
soul the rest.
But how to take last leave of all I loved?
I cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine
I cannot take thy hand; that too is flesh,
And in the flesh thou hast sinned; and mine own flesh,
Here looking down on thine polluted, cries ‘I loathe thee’; yet not
less, O Guinevere,
For I was ever virgin save for thee,
My love thro’ flesh hath wrought into my life
So far, that my doom is, I love thee still.
Let no man dream but that I love thee still.
Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul,
And so thou lean on our fair father Christ,
Hereafter in that world where all are pure
We two may meet before high God, and thou
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know
I am thine husband, not a smaller soul
Leave me that, I charge thee my last hope.
Now must I hence.
Thro the thick night I hear the trumpet blow."
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